Soon, there will be nothing left to save. Hopefully this is Indy scaremongering. Who knows?

Cash For Classrooms (Independent Linky)

😯

No, no, no my friend the much bigger story is this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/jul/01/michael-gove-school-summer-holiday

In a Mel Gibson playing Rob Roy style:

“He may take our pensions, he may freeze our wages, BUT HE WILL NOT TAKE OUR HOLIDAYS!!!!!!!”

I can’t believe anyone ever thought this wasn’t the agenda they were working towards.

Even private/public schools don’t try and run at a profit because they know it’s incompatible with their educational aims.

Makes me sad.

Even private/public schools don’t try and run at a profit because they know it’s incompatible with their educational aims.

This.
Private schools put their ‘profit’ back into their facilities/services – state schools will cut facilities in order to try and make a profit.
As for holidays – if the summer holiday is reduced by two weeks this would have a detrimental effect on British holiday destinations and, presuming the extra two weeks are added to other holidays in the year, mean that kids just spend more time in front of the TV because it’s cold/wet outside.
I have two girls with three weeks left in state education and I’ll be glad to get out of it if this is the way it’s going (which it is as labour want the same thing re holidays).

Private schools put their ‘profit’ back into their facilities/services – state schools will cut facilities in order to try and make a profit.

s’good wheeze innit?

Private schools become the last bastion of coperative socialism in the educational system 😀

William Wallace

Same thing as is happening with the NHS. Privatise all that you can, criticise all that you can’t until the popular conception is that non-privatised doesn’t work.

Schools shouldn’t have to make money, is there any right thinking person that seriously thinks that is what they should be there for?

This has always been Goves Agenda with Academies. Remove them from local authority control so they’re independent, can set their own rules (and wages, or the need for teaching qualifications), and are no longer answerable to those pesky democratically elected local representatives.

Throw a load of public money at them (academies receive hugely disproportionate amounts per pupil than normal education authority schools). Then they’ll all have nice shiny new (taxpayer funded) buildings to hand over for a song to your mates, to then make a killing from. Then simply starve the remaining state schools of cash.

And voila… you have achieved your aim. Complete polarisation of the education system. Private academies will (openly or not) cherry pick nice middle class pupils. Leaving the poor to rot in sink schools

It sums up nicely pretty much everything about these bunch of ****s!!!!

Gove needs throwing out of an aircraft mid way accross the Atlantic.

What,and increase pollution in the Atlantic?

And the Gulf Stream would just bring him back here 😯

As Pob seems to think he knows all there is to know about education. far more than actual teachers. I think he should be made to spend the rest of his life teaching the curriculum of his personal design (Latin? English History, Religious studies) to classes of 5-16 year olds, in a damp, grey, crumbling sink school in the dodgiest estate in the country, where there are 30 different languages spoken

Lets see how he gets on

binners – Member
And voila… you have achieved your aim. Complete polarisation of the education system. Private academies will (openly or not) cherry pick nice middle class pupils. Leaving the poor to rot in sink schools

How’s that done?

How’s that done?

They set their own admission rules.

Include an interview in the process and you can exclude anyone who doesn’t sound right.

he is a **** loon amongst a bunch of **** loons

Did the debacle with exams and the “dumbing down” caused by the “competition” to get people to do your papers not show the tit that competition is not always the panacea he thinks it is. It may lead to lowering [exam] standards in order to just make money. Furthermore state regulation of this “industry” may actually be required to maintain standards as companies want profits rather than excellence as their mantra.

He is an absolute prize tit who just has a political agenda that pays no attention to what reality has shown him re competition and profit in education and what it has actually achieved.

Will he next be campaigning for the return of the 11 plus and charging a grand to sit it ?

binners – Member
As Pob seems to think he knows all there is to know about education. far more than actual teachers. I think he should be made to spend the rest of his life teaching the curriculum of his personal design (Latin? English History, Religious studies) to classes of 5-16 year olds, in a damp, grey, crumbling sink school in the dodgiest estate in the country, where there are 30 different languages spoken
Lets see how he gets on
POSTED 7 MINUTES AGO # REPORT-POST

With detailed lesson plans to produce every evening and marking with lots of comments, plus an OFSTED inspector with him to pull him apart on any slight mistake especially if the pace of the lesson does not meet the inspectors personal criteria!

As always with Gove, we should be nervous about some of what he says, his apparent failure in this case to understand how hedge funds and private equity firms work, and the high likelihood that execution will be flawed BUT at the same time appreciate that there may well be some kernel of sense and truth in what he says.

At the core of this are some basic facts – educational demand will continue to rise, supply will remain restricted (eg, choice of school, schools’ capacity etc), the state budget will be insufficient to fund either basic “maintenance” and “growth” investment in education and an element of (much needed IMO) choice in education continues to be constrained by issues such as access to non-state funding.

But we have to get away from this false notion that the the public and private sectors cannot (indeed do not already) work effectively together. This already happens in plenty of areas including nursery education.

Gove should step away from the headline making rhetoric and focus on appropriate small steps. He should know that the current business model for academies is questionable (or as the guy in the Independent article stated, not viable). His first step should be a simple one – focus on the appropriate means to allow certain parts of the educational system to access private sector financing ie, to be able to borrow. But please do not confuse this with hedge funds or private equity – that would not be the correct source IMO.

This already happens in plenty of areas including nursery education.

Moot point and separate debate of course but many would feel that in terms of pre-school education, it doesn’t work well, least of all in favour of the children and parents.

What Gove should do is listen to the advisors (who frankly know a lot more than him) he appoints rather than continuously ignore them in pursuit of an ideology. Or just do the country a favour and let someone else take over.

THM – you mean hedge funds and private equity firms aren’t the purely philanthropic organisations I’d been led to believe?

I’m shocked!!!!

DD – well yes, that is perhaps a separate debate with views on both sides! But at the very least we need to be elevate the debate below the base-case (in both senses of the word “base”) typified by the comments from Christine Blowers in the Indy article. Unhelpful and misleading claptrap that consigns educational development and investment to the slow lane IMO (of course!).

No binners, that is not what I am saying 😉 ! IMO, they have investment criteria (including time horizons, expected IRRs etc) that are likely to be in conflict with the longer-term requirements of education. One look at the profit-margins achieved in Sweden would send most HF managers scurrying for cover! Gove needs a little more “homework” time if he thinks that the two sides would have mutually compatible objectives.

I don’t think it is a bad things if school holidays change my final secondary school ran a system of 5 terms with no half term holidays. Summer holiday would be 4 weeks then at the end of each term you had a 2 week break apart from the 5 where you had your 4 week summer jolly. The 2 weeks breaks were much better than 1 week half terms that don’t enable you to recoup properly.

“He may take our pensions, he may freeze our wages, BUT HE WILL NOT TAKE OUR HOLIDAYS!!!!!!!”

Why do kids need more than 4-5 weeks off? It’s not like they need to pick crops in the fields anymore. It’s a complete pain in the arse.

Bring them in line with a normal working year and get rid of homework.

Why do kids need more than 4-5 weeks off?

tbh, I’d rather my kids had 6 weeks off in the summer than 3 weeks at Christmas and Easter and 4 in the summer.

And if they’re not off in the summer, who’s going to set fire to all the moors in East Lancs eh? I’m not bloody doing it!

Why do kids need more than 4-5 weeks off? It’s not like they need to pick crops in the fields anymore.

The summer break was never about harvest – when widespread schooling really kicked in we had a pretty urbanised population – it was to be in line with the summer break taken by the legal profession and MPs.

he is a ****

Hopefully this is Indy scaremongering.

Given that it’s the same leaked memo they “Exclusively revealed” 6 months ago….I’m going with Indy scaremongering 🙂

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/secret-memo-shows-michael-goves-plan-for-privatisation-of-academies-8488552.html

Why do kids need more than 4-5 weeks off?

Ask a kid!

That summer holiday was the glory of the whole year. A time to be alive, instead of a slave. What’ve kids got left to look forward to if you take that away?

I do wonder what other bad news is it they’re trying to bury whenever Gove opens his mouth with his latest headline grabbing load of stupidity.

5thElefant – Member

Why do kids need more than 4-5 weeks off?

To be kids.

N’wind +1 and lets hope we can ease off on the internship/work experience overkill at the same time. There is plenty of time on the corporate treadmill. Kids need to be kids – even (late) teenagers and students IMO.

The Mash sums it up nicely

Being a kid now just as shit as being an adult

Just think of your own chilhood memories. They’re full of the unbridled joy of the summer holidays. Michael Gove, and everyone who agrees with him on the subject, is simply a miserable old ****!!! So there!! 😛

Tangentially related, but this hasn’t been reported widely. The SLC is going to be sold off to a private company. Hope you’ve all paid off your loans, otherwise look forward to the capped interest rate going out the door in the near future.

Social mobility? None of that thanks! What a shower of c***s

http://www.newstatesman.com/economics/2013/06/danny-alexander-confirms-student-loan-book-will-be-privatised

A year ago, we had a student at our place who had a stroke when she was 14. She battled back to finish her GCSEs, but had another bleed which knocked her even further.

She came to us initially to take two AS levels, but had another bleed during her first year and so missed the rest of the year.

She restarted the following year, doing just one AS level, because she was wiped out after just an hour. With surgeries and relapses, it took her two years to complete the AS level and another year to finish the full A level.

For the time she was in with us, she had one-to-one support from a learning support assistant, plus we modified some desks, moved some classes to ground floor rooms and put on extra support to get her up to speed in the exams and provided rooms for her to take the exam, plus the 100% extra time she was allowed.

Because of the way we’re funded, I’m pretty certain that the college didn’t get a single penny in funding for her. Would this have happened if we were run to make a profit? I really hope it would, but I doubt it.

It’s not like they need to pick crops in the fields anymore. It’s a complete pain in the arse.

Indeed I mean having to take responsibility for my children personally and doing things to provide for their care and well being…how dare they expect this of me? Dont these people know I have other things to do instead of parenting so why wont the sate do it for me

Gove needs a little more “homework” time if he thinks that the two sides would have mutually compatible objectives.

He is not going to let the facts on the ground get in thw way of his political ideology- when a rabid lefty is criticising you for this then you are really in the shit 😉

I like the ideas about changing holiday ‘layouts’ around.
And for anyone not happy with Goves plan, move north…. Devolution has a benefit…

And for anyone not happy with Goves plan, move north vote the **** out…. Devolution democracy has a benefit…

FTFY

SamB – Member

Tangentially related, but this hasn’t been reported widely. The SLC is going to be sold off to a private company.

It’s a bit of a scary one this. SLC are one of the most mismanaged organisations I’ve ever had the misfortune to deal with (privately and professionally) So changing that would be good, though in practice I reckon you’d just end up with all of that existing ****ness tied to a profitmaking bent to boot…

But to make the selloff work means 1 of 2 things… Either undervalue it, and turn a longterm asset into a smaller short term asset so that someone else can profit, or, change the terms so that more can be made off the existing asset. First one obviously just the usual shortsighted assetstripping that governments do because they’d rather look good before the next election than think about the next 20 years.

Second one, not so obvious the impact… Obviously it’s The Shaft for existing SLC customers, and basically reneging on a promise made to kids. But it’s also the possibility of The Shaft for all future students. And considering the sums of money we’re talking about, student borrowing is already a massive issue and it’s only barely acceptable because of those terms.